The Right Is Starting To Get It Right

Ed West writes:

Workers of Britain, glorious news! One in four chief executives at the country's biggest companies took home a 41pc rise in total pay last year, while ordinary workers saw just a 1pc salary increase. According to the report, Barclays’ Bob Diamond was the highest paid chief executive last year, taking home £20.97m.

The second most handsomely reward boss in the FTSE 100 is Sir Martin Sorrell of the WPP Group, who tomorrow faces a showdown with investors over his latest 60pc pay rise.

There are various other people mentioned in the report but the sums involved are so astronomical it’s like someone trying to explain how many stars there are in the universe. The human brain has not evolved enough to comprehend the figures being paid out in the City of London. 

The other day Comrade Delingpole quoted a new CPS report by Tim Morgan which calls for “reforming our capitalist system so that it serves everyone, not just a privileged minority. Capitalism should reward success, not failure. It should benefit shareholders (which means most people), not just executives.”

At the moment it clearly doesn’t, as even the most enthusiastic capitalist running dog should concede.

Sorrell is one of the CEOs mentioned in Ferdinand Mount’s recent book The New Few, which looks at how capitalism turned Britain into an oligarchy. He cites JP Morgan’s famous quote that an executive should not earn more than 20 times that of his lowest paid colleague, yet Sorrell makes 631 times what the average WPP employee gets, and the ratio at Tesco is 900 times.

Tesco is at least a successful company; many of the fat cats being paid enormous bonuses have presided over companies with declining share prices and even bankruptcy. The private sector has started to take on the worst aspects of the public sector – rewarding failure – while the public sector has taken on the worst characteristics of the private – greed (Mount cites the many outrageous examples of pay rises for bosses of NHS foundations, universities and quangos).

Having endured the economic decline of the Wilson-Heath era conservatives have always felt the tribal need to defend such outrageous rewards, pointing out (correctly) that the taxes the rich pay contribute an enormous amount to society.

But perhaps conservatives are starting to realise that while inequality is not a bad thing in itself, taken to such extreme levels it starts to mire the country in corruption and leaves the ordinary middle-class locked out of the system (not to mention being unable to afford property in neighbourhoods they would have once considered theirs).

As Mount points out, even share-ownership, which was supposed to create a nation of stakeholders has instead become dominated by corporate funds, managed by well-paid professionals: in 1963 some 54 per cent of shares were owned by private individuals; by 1981 it was 27 per cent, and by 2011 it was just 10 per cent. As Mount points out: “The Stock Exchange has become an oligarchy”.

As a great philosopher once put it: “The whole world cries out, ‘Peace, freedom, and a few less fat bastards eating all the pie!’” 

Ah, the Tory cry of "King [or Queen] and People" against the Whig magnates, whose and whose successors' ideology many people have mistaken for Toryism due to the nature of the Conservative Party as the takeover of the Tory machine by successive waves of Liberal infiltration.

Restricting top pay for the common good, for the social order, for the national interest, is the most classically Tory proposal imaginable. It is right up there with protecting British goods and services, and therefore British jobs and British sovereignty, from foreign competition. Or with refusing to participate in any war other  than in defence of one or more specific British interests, and certainly not merely to "spread freedom and democracy" or what have you, still less to promote the interests of one or more foreign states rather than our own.

Those who say otherwise are historically and philosophically illiterate. Like their heroine, the daughter of, even if posthumously, the last great commercial baron from the provinces to hold national political sway through Victorian and Edwardian Liberalism.